A collection of essays on a wide range of aspects of the Roma communities, cultures, social and political conditions across Europe.


The scholarly field of Romany studies is trapped by the history of Roma in a unique and peculiar position in Europe. The investigation of Roma was in the past marginal to academic concerns because most of its practitioners were amateur folklorists interested in treating the Roma as paragons of a lost world and not as citizens of modern nation-states. Today the field is hemmed in by two different power fields: the emotionally understandable, though intellectually debilitating, concern to turn the plight of the Roma into a matter of 'human rights' and the difficulty that academics experience in dealing with people who are not "a people” in the sense that nation states constitute and make "peoples".